I've seen advertisements for Arduino boards with the Atmega168 programmed with the Arduino bootloader. How is this done? I've tried doing this in PonyProg (which doesn't claim to support the Atmega168 but can be used to write its flash memory) and the resulting Atmega doesn't boot when plugged into an Arduino board.

If someone can just point me to an atmega168 .hex bootloader file, i would be most pleased!

i used ponyprog for that .hex file (and though ponyprog claims it doesn't recognize the device, it does stuff when you hit ignore and then claims the write was successful). i'm not really clear on whether i should be flashing the flash or uploading to the eeprom - i know what these terms mean, but how they apply to the arduino have never been clear. does the arduino pay any attention to eeprom? anyway, my flashed atmega168 showed more signs of life when placed on an arduino board - that digital out 13 LED flashed a few times. but the TX LED never flashed and it never turned into any sort of usable arduino. is there any other atmel chip that fits in this socket that i could try? lord knows they're cheap enough!

by the way, the dongle programmer thing i'm using is the AVR-PG1. What programming software should I be trying with this dongle, the olimex AVR-P28 board and the ATMEGA168? I'm totally new to microcontrollers and the AVR world, but I have extensive experience in digital electronics, usually making things happen with flip flops, logic gates, and what not. the arduino board makes things so much easier, but I need a little more memory to write routines to drive an LCD display.

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neillzero

The arduino system doesn't pay attention to the eeprom, as far as I can tell. It is data memory, rather than program memory. You are free to use it to persist parameters, or last sensor readings, or whatever. Neither the build process nor bootloader docs mention eeprom at all.

Note there's only 512 bytes of this eeprom on both the atmega8 and atmega168.

I might be hideously wrong about this, but I've wiped all 512 bytes of my eeprom and... so far so good. The bootloader does have code for writing to eeprom but I don't know if it currently does. A possible use of eeprom by the bootloader would be keeping a track of the number of times the flash had been written (helping you to predict when it's going to fail).

I also heard a rumour that the atmega8s prepared on the arduino boards have future winning lottery ticket numbers written in that space, so some people do a backup first.

I just successfully wrote the ATmegaBOOT_168.hex file to my Atmega168 using the AVR-PG1 serial donglehttp://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=14using avrdude and the command lineavrdude -patmega168 -cponyser -Pcom1 -b9600 -u -Uflash:w:a.hex(where a.hex is a renamed ATmegaBOOT_168.hex)What I wouldn't have given for someone to give me a real world example of that program in use!

Now, though, that reflashed Atmega168 is still unrecognized by the Arduino environment.Has anyone ever used an Atmega168 in an Arduino board?

I know about the processor selection menu and that isn't my problem. But if you or anyone else can get a dump of the flash memory on a working Arduino Atmega168 and post it here somehow, maybe I could try that out. I guess you'd have to use avrdude or a program like that - Arduino can't read processors at all.

For the time being I've given up on getting a bootloader to work on my Atmega168. I compiled my Arduino sketch using the Atmega168 processor setting and then went and dug the .hex file out of the applet folder in its project folder. Then I uploaded it to Atmega168 using AVRdude and the AVR-PG1 dongle. This all worked fine.

The sketch I'd uploaded has a known behavior of outputting (over the serial output) a line of space-delimited integers every two seconds. Interestingly, I noticed that though it was working, it was doing so much more slowly than normal and the output was garbled at the expected baud rate. So I did some experiments by changing the build.f_cpu in the preferences file, ultimately changing it from 16 MHz to just one MHz. At 1 MHz the baud rate matched the one expected, meaning that somehow the compilation process for the Atmega168 is misjudging the baud rate timing by a factor of 16. Mind you, I know for a fact that it is actually being clocked at 16MHz (an Atmega8 works exactly as expected in this same socket). Does anyone have any theories about this peculiar behavior? I have a feeling this all will go a long way to explaining why the Atmega168 bootloader isn't working.

The fuses on your ATmega168 aren't set correctly; fuses being the bane of microcontroller programming - a few important but obscure options that you can only set with an external programmer. The ATmega168 defaults to the use of a 1 MHz internal clock (e.g. ignoring the 16 MHZ crystal on your board).

The fuses you want might be:high fuse: 0xdflow fuse: 0xc7extended fuse: 0x08but it's also possible that they will make your ATmega168 unusable. I've had lots of problems trying to find the right fuse settings, and particularly with setting the extended fuse (which most AVRs, like the ATmega8, don't have).

paypal me $15 at bigfunATverizon.net and send me your snail mail address and i'll make you one.$10 each for each additional atmega168 in the package. if lots of people take advantage of this, you might have to wait for me to resupply.

Well, interestingly, if you look at its source there appears to be support in the Arduino bootloader code (the version I use for the Atmega168) for the Atmega32 (and other AVR processors not often discussed). The problem is that there is no actual support in the Arduino IDE for Atmega32. It's crucial that the IDE know about the Atmega32 or it won't be able to do anything. If I was a little more adventurous I would have waded into the IDE source code to see what had changed to add Atmgea168 support and see if those changes, geared to the specifics of the Atmega32, could then added again. But I'd want one of the Arduino old school kids here to point me in the right direction first.